Menticulture Blog

BBC - this is what we do

And what do the BBC do? Editorialise and announce. That's what they're good at. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for the institutional voice, and of all the institutions I'll be sad to see go when anarchy finally reigns, it will be the BBC I'll mourn most. In fairness, the only other thing I'll mourn will be a constant supply of Irish Whiskey, since I imagine that when we surface in our future collective mutualism, Bushmills will be hard to source.

Radio 4 is, as Stephen Fry has already said, one of the pinnacles of human cultural achievement (well for an hour or so a day anyway). Its factual programming is excellent and illuminating in a middle-class sort of way. It's where I learn most of the UK political news that I consume, and as Mark Frauenfelder says on BoingBoing, 'In Our Time' is one of the best programmes available as a podcast produced by anybody in the world.

But the BBC doesn't know how not to editorialise and announce. Many commentators, especially in America, have lauded many of the announcements that come out of the BBC, citing it's funding structure and public service remit as a the reason why it is so ready to embrace participation and 'user generated content'. Actually, for all of these announcements, the beeb have failed to do much of it, and revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of what this so-called 'UGC' is really about.

What announcements were these?

October 2006: BBCi to showcase user's content. Right okay, where in the vast fray of people talking to each other on the internet did you get the overwhelming feeling that what they want was for their stuff to be 'showcased'? What are you, butterfly collectors now? When was the last time you went to a gallery to observe a conversation - indeed, how do you 'showcase' communication? Surely all you need to try to do is facilitate it? Sure this happens already on h2g2 and other talk boards hosted on BBCi, in a heavily moderated sort of way. Thanks for protecting us from ourselves. And what makes you think that the creations that people make need to be legitimised by your patronage?

September 2006: BBC sign a 'memo of understanding' with Microscoft. Ah, now here's a clue to the underlying thinking here. Microsoft, king of the embrace-and-extend technique, are called in to help you do your web services. On the surface, there's nothing wrong with seeing new stuff, and wanting to do the same thing better. Under the skin, all that's really there is institutionalisation and monolithic thinking. Microsoft's embrace-and-extend is really only about breaking and pulverising. Excuse me if waiting for this to happen doesn't give me the bends. Besides, the point is to do what you like, how you like.

May 2006: BBC & We-Media. Headlined as talking about 'a media revolution'. Talk on. A conference dominated by bitching about blogging vs journalism, with the BBC's Helen Boaden arguing that journalists sift facts, while bloggers are trying to 'steamroll' their subjective accounts of the world. Way to get all revolutionary.

April 2006: Creative Future of audience participation, so good they announced it (at least?) twice. Mark Thompson tells the world that BBC will spend six years transforming itself into something relevant to the digital age. Ashley Highfield chips in with plans for users to 'contribute'. Central to these announcements is the notion of audience participation and personalisation. Excellent plans. But do you really know how to do it? Honestly, I'd love to see you adopt this approach. But so far the evidence of your ability to deliver on these promises is scant, and I'm not the only one who thinks so...

March 2006: Reinventing web services. And of course, this is typical. Why do you need to reinvent them? They've already been invented. Make better ones. Was your Creative Archive, that brilliant experiment in delivering creative-commons-licensed, mashup-able clips of, um, penguins, proof of your prowess in getting in on the whole creative web thing? The point of these web-services is that they put an end to walled gardens of content. They let people make stuff and spread it around. You don't know how to do it, because it's the opposite of what you do. Remix the schedule? Gee thanks.

You see, after the 2005 We-Media conference, at which Richard Sambrook stated (listen to the 'We News' mp3 download) that he saw the future of BBC news as being a kind of 'framing organisation', harnessing the participation of the 'audience', I was really looking forward to seeing it happen. A few weeks later, Kevin Marsh, then editor of Radio 4's Today Programme, gave a talk at Bournemouth University (which, we were told, was supposed to be off-the-record, well sod them). I asked him about Sambrook's statement, and what plans were in place to start the process of embracing the audience and engaging with 'citizen-journalism'. He said that the BBC planned to sign up 100 people who would be non-professional, and provide them with the facilities to blog on the BBC website. Well, that's a great start. Unfortunately, that was a year ago, and if it happened, it was bloody quiet.

And what have we seen most recently? Your News. Whose news? Yours? Ours? Mine? Theirs? That's the first hint, I suppose. 'You' aren't 'us'. Here's us, over here, and there's you, over there. So I watched the first one when it launched on BBC News 24 a couple of weeks ago. I even showed the first few minutes to some undergraduates. We got a countdown of the top 10 stories, measured, I think, by number of comments generated on the BBC talk boards. It was backed by a bit of a racy jingle, which put me in mind of Mark Goodier doing the Sunday night top 40. In the first three minutes of this program there was none of my news, nothing of anyone's news. Just BBC editorialisation and patronisation. What the hell are you thinking? Who the fuck is going to watch this bollocks? Is the premise really that, having made ourselves some news, you'll deliver it back to us like some infinitely recurring mirror nightmare? Do we really need you to tell us what you noticed we gave a shit about? I tell you what, give us that fucking camera if you're not going to do anything useful with it...

As you can see, it actually made me angry.

BBC, I love you really, like I love my bookcase or my box of tapes, or my aging car. But please, just stop making all these fucking announcements! Oh, hang on, that's, um, what you do...

its

I've just spent a slightly disappointing half-hour watching the new BBC Four series 'Never Mind the Full Stops' - I suppose by the name it's meant to be a Buzzcocks for intellectual middle-class wankers (like me). Basically it's the televisual equivalent of Radio 4 at 1.30pm on a very, very slow day. It did however give me the pleasure of discovering that Janet Street-Porter and David Aaronovitch don't know the correct punctuation of the impersonal genative. (That would be "its" - without apostrophe). I was also able to feel smug about finding cacophonisms mildly amusing.

For the previous half-hour, though, I think I decided that Victoria Coren is possibly the world's perfect woman. :) She would certainly provide the world's greatest father-in-law.

It's absolutely fascinating, and extremely enjoyable to hear him bat away condescending and stupid questions from people like David Mellor. He also talks about the idea of conscious naivete - that state a musician is in when the discipline of the instrument and the knowledge of a piece of music is subsumed, and the performance of the music can become truly possible.

I wonder if it is at all possible to achieve that kind of 'performance' in a visual medium - what could it mean? How does a visual artist 'perform' at all? When you play music, and forget what your fingers are doing, and feel only the music coming out, you can say you are performing. Can a visual artist ever say the same?

Whatever the case, the Reith lectures are unfailingly brilliant - last year's lectures about the progress of technology were fascinating - and marred only by the fact that the BBC insist on having Sue fucking Lawley chair them.